A Less Fashionable Warby Charles Shaw
www.dissidentvoice.org
September 29, 2005
First Published in
Newtopia Magazine

Malcolm
X once said, “Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human
beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men
kept behind bars -- caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but
there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms.”

On Friday, September
9th I became one of the roughly 25,000 people released from an Illinois
prison this year -- 600,000 nationally -- after completing only 10 weeks
of a one-year sentence due to extreme overcrowding. My crime was
victimless, simple possession of a controlled substance, specifically a
small amount of marijuana and MDMA.

But as the rare upper-middle class educated White American in prison, I
found myself in a truly alien, self-perpetuating world of crushing poverty
and ignorance, violent dehumanization, institutionalized racism, and an
entire sub-culture of recidivists, some of whom had done nine and ten
stints, many dating back to the Seventies. Most used prison as a form of
criminal networking knowing full well they would be left to fend for
themselves when released. We were told on many occasions that an inmate
was worth more inside prison than back in society. Considering it costs an
average of $37,000 a year to incarcerate offenders, and the average income
for Black Americans is $24,000, and only $8,000-12,000 for poor Blacks,
one can easily see their point.

But unlike the vast majority of ex-offenders, I was fortunate enough to
return to an established life and work, and a support system of friends,
family, and colleagues.

The Chicago Tribune reported this year that about two-thirds of the
more than 600,000 ex-convicts released in 2005 will be re-arrested within
three years, and about half will return to prison for a new crime or
violation of parole. Despite having “paid their debt to society”, once
released their punishment is not nearly over. These days there is little
to no hope of any real reform, as within the various Departments of
Corrections, “correction” is a painfully misleading euphemism for the
warehousing of offenders. There are few, if any, re-entry programs for
ex-offenders and virtually no jobs or social services to help keep them
afloat in an increasingly difficult and unforgiving society. Thus, most
ex-offenders have no choice but to return to their old crime infested
neighborhoods, destitute and desperate to survive any way they can. A
significant majority of the new crimes or parole violations are drug
related, often nothing more than testing positive on a monthly drug
screen.

This lack of any employment, training, or rehabilitative opportunities has
created a permanent underclass of ex-offenders who remain trapped in
poverty, unable to provide for themselves or their families without
resorting to the few, generally illegal means available to them. Faced
with their very survival, most have no compunction about engaging (or
re-engaging, as the case may be) in drug dealing rather than starving.

What may be even worse is that for some, their ongoing “crimes” are only
those of association, or in some cases, the consequences of being black
and poor. Laws prohibiting ex-felons from associating with other ex-felons
and gang members, such as the Illinois Street Gang Terrorism Omnibus
Prevention Act, or those preventing ex-offenders from being in areas
designated as “high crime” or where “controlled substances are illegally
sold, used, distributed, or administered” means that many ex-offenders are
in violation of their parole simply by going home, where the majority in
their neighborhood, including family members, have criminal records, and
drugs are sold on almost every corner.

I cannot begin to recount all the men I met, particularly those with prior
records or those on parole, who were re-incarcerated for crimes they did
not commit, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time
with the wrong people. Gasps! Not possible! Lies! Propaganda! Our system
is just! True it is, for those who can afford justice in the form of a
bond and a private lawyer, or for those whom the system is not already
unduly prejudiced. But in a system with corrupt cops eager for arrests,
zealous State Attorneys eager for convictions, jaded and overwhelmed
Public Defenders eager for quick pleas, and rigid bond judges eager to set
bail far beyond what anyone in their socio-economic class could reasonably
afford, there is little opportunity for a fair trial. For so many,
including myself, the conditions in the penitentiary were preferable to
those in Cook County Jail -- where some 30,000 detainees languish awaiting
the resolution of their cases—so a quick plea is the lesser of all evils
and the shortest route to freedom. Had I chose to fight my case, there is
little doubt I would still be there today. In the end, what does that say
about our criminal justice system?

Instead of correction and rehabilitation, what we have is what University
of Nevada-Las Vegas Criminal Justice professor Richard Shelden calls a
"criminal justice industrial complex" where “the police, the courts and
the prison system have become huge, self-serving and self-perpetuating
bureaucracies, which along with corporations, have a vested interest in
keeping crime at a certain level. They need victims and they need
criminals, even if they have to invent them, as they have throughout the
‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on gangs,’”

Thirty years ago Gore Vidal noted that “roughly 80% of police work in the
United States has to do with the regulation of our private
morals…controlling what we drink, eat, smoke, put into our veins…with whom
and how we have sex or gamble.” Then there were roughly 250,000 prisoners
in the nation. Today there is more than 2 million, with another million in
county jails awaiting trial or sentencing, and another roughly 3 million
under “correctional supervision” on probation or parole. The total
national cost of incarceration then was $4 billion annually; today it’s
$64 billion, with another $20 billion in federal money and $22-24 billion
in money from state governments earmarked for waging the so-called “War on
Drugs.” Nationally, around 60% or more of these prisoners are drug
criminals. Yet, throughout all this time and expense there has not been
the slightest decrease in either drug use or supply.

And amidst all the talk of race as a factor in the Katrina disaster let us
not forget a bigger disaster: One in every 20 Black men over the age of 18
is in prison compared to 1 in 180 White men. Despite African Americans
comprising only 12% of the total population, in five states, including
Illinois, the ratio of Black to White prisoners is 13 to 1. The U.S.
Department of Justice reports that Blacks comprise 56.7% of all drug
offenders admitted to state prisons while Whites comprise only 23.3% (in
my Illinois prison -- one of 28 in the State -- of the 1,076 inmates, 689
were Black, 251 were White, and 123 were Latino). Based upon these
numbers, a full 30% of African-Americans will see time in prison during
their life, compared with only 5% of White Americans, even though White
drug users outnumber Blacks by a five-to-one margin.

Anyone familiar with these facts was not surprised by the response to the
largely poor and black victims of Katrina. It was simply a further
affirmation of their invisible status within our society, further proof of
the Third World existing within the First in America. What may be the
biggest shame of all is how New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin himself reinforced
all the most miserable Black stereotypes by characterizing the looters as
“drug starved crazy addicts wreaking havoc” in an attempt to expedite
Federal assistance and justify a declaration of martial law. It spoke
volumes to what resonates within the public consciousness, stirring up
some of our deepest fears.

It’s time to realize, once and for all, that this war is lost. It’s akin
to trying to empty the flooded New Orleans streets one teaspoon at a time.
But sadly, Americans have forgotten this war amongst the multitude of more
fashionable, media-friendly others that have arisen in the last five
years. As peace groups mobilize for a national march on Washington later
this month to end the Iraq War, a few miles away from the Mall the Drug
War is still raging. The Sentencing Project and the Schaffer Library for
Drug Policy reported that at one point in the 1990s half of all of Black
men 18-35 in Washington D.C. were either in jail or on probation or
parole, and more than ninety percent had arrest records.

No matter how much money the government pours into the War on Drugs, it
doesn’t appear to make a dent in drug use or drug-related crime. The body
count in this “war” still rises. Dead and corrupted cops, dead gang youth,
dead traffickers and couriers, dead innocent bystanders -- the urban
“collateral damage” -- devastated families, addiction, disease, overdoses
from unregulated, poor quality drugs, exploding prisons, crushing costs,
corrupt officials, craven politicians, sensationalist media, and a
limitless harvest of offenders. Where does the madness end?

We cannot address poverty and race in America nor can we talk about
needless death and expense without addressing the Drug War. If we don’t
stop the direction in which we are heading, by 2020 there will be over 6
million people in prison, and thousands more lives extinguished in the
crossfire of a domestic war that we had no chance of winning in the first
place.

Charles Shaw, a writer and activist,
is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of
Newtopia. A contributing writer to many publications including
Alternet, Guerrilla News Network, and The Next American City,
he is currently writing a series on his recent prison experience.